5 - Gender, Nation and Conquest

Summary

NARRATIVES OF WAR, conquest and invasion involve gender constructions and definitions. This is not a particularly bold or new statement given the age-old distinction that warfare is what men do and women do not. Such essentialist assumptions need to be located within specific rhetorical and historical contexts. Recent work, particularly modern studies of war and gender, has emphasised the multitude of ways in which the social construct of gender and a gendered language can interact in representations of war and warfare. Mrinalini Sinha has considered representations of British and Indian men in late nineteenth-century India within the framework of colonial and imperial history. Using gender as a synonym for power relations, Sinha argued that imperialism was so powerful a force that it resulted in the portrayal of some colonised men as effeminate and a recasting of the colonisers as more manly. The distribution of such gendered power was always a two-way process, which had to be constantly defined in order to be sustained. Diana Wylie's work on disease and diet in twentieth-century perceptions of the British Empire has argued that gender should be seen as a construct informed by its political and social circumstances. For her, gender was critical to an understanding of relations between the colonised and the coloniser, given that imperialism helped draw tighter boundaries of masculinity and femininity that were often bitterly contested. There is the implication here that narratives of war, conquest and invasion involve a ‘clarifying moment’, which illuminates the workings of gender systems by involving the redefinition and reclarification of masculinity and femininity for all concerned.